Funds are requested to support an international workshop to establish guidelines for standardizing the construction and reporting of genetic maps in man. It will be held at NIH in Bethesda, MD on June 15-16, 1990 and will include ten scientists from the USA and five scientists from the United Kingdom and France. The primary focus of the meeting will be to provide a set of guidelines for investigators involved in the development of genetic maps of the human genome. To simplify the application of these guidelines, modifications of existing computer programs for linkage analysis will be discussed. Recommendations for presentation of linkage data in publications and database interfaces in order to maximize the use of these data will be developed. To promote comparison of genetic maps among investigators, criteria for identifying skeletal loci will be recommended. It essential that the construction of genetic maps and their representation be standardized as soon as possible in order to avoid a situation where the biomedical community is faced with a confusing array of genetic maps of each chromosome. More importantly, the standardization of maps will greatly facilitate integration of the physical and genetic maps which is goal of the Human Genome Initiative, and it will maximize the use of expensive and labor intensive linkage data derived from all laboratories.